When Gwyn eventually hits his stride, he’s terrific. An auspicious first.
Eight linked stories cast a baleful light on fear, loathing, and sexual repression in the Bible Belt.
Brace yourself for immersion in a world of sinners and saved, backsliders and revivals, where women are often Satan’s means of tempting men and two men coupling are the ultimate abomination. It is a world seen up close in the “boring, stale, weary little town” of Perser, Oklahoma, dominated by its First Pentecostal church. The opening stories don’t quite work. “Of Falling” contrasts its passive, tight-lipped protagonist’s near-fatal fall and excruciating dreams with his posturing wife’s well-protected falls at revival meetings, while “Courtship” presents a Perser native who’s been in love with another man since they were playmates—though Jansen, scared silly by his church, doesn’t see himself as gay. This drawn-out story has a plaintive Carson McCullers quality, but Gwyn flubs Jansen’s climactic declaration, compensating with a closing image of heterosexual perversion worthy of Kraft-Ebbing. Then come two effective vignettes: “Against the Pricks” has 14-year-old Gabriel, tormented by self-abuse but cleansed by a revival, lashing out viciously at a sweetly innocent potential girlfriend, while in “In Tongues,” not even the pastor is safe from the Devil. Losing the gift of tongues, the Reverend Hassler spews filth from the pulpit, wrecking his ministry. Not all the insights into Pentecostalism are negative—Spencer, a lonely liberal in “Truck,” envies his God-struck mother’s “simple abandon”—yet the powerful and well-plotted closing pieces are a no-holds-barred indictment of fundamentalism run amok. In “The Backsliders,” some kids stumble on two guys having sex in a cave, and an enraged church elder batters one of them so hard he kills him. “Dog on the Cross,” true to its title, is about a puppy found nailed to an outdoor cross during a weeks-long revival conducted by a mesmerizing teenage preacher. It’s an exciting whodunit with an obvious suspect, a reclusive easterner, though the physical evidence points to the evangelists themselves.
When Gwyn eventually hits his stride, he’s terrific. An auspicious first.Pub Date: March 26, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-412-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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